Sir,—I was very surprised at the omission of the place Faughart in the recent article ‘St Brigit—who was she?’ by Edel Bhreathnach (HI 32.2, March/April 2024). Professor Bhreathnach rightly points out that the entries in the early annals, including the dates of Brigit’s birth and death, will always be open to interpretation. The Irish annals record that Faughart, Co. Louth, is the birthplace of Brigit. This claim has not been disputed and no other location down the centuries has been so associated. So why no recognition by the professor of Faughart as Brigit’s birthplace?
The seventh-century Life by Cogitosus—most likely a monk in her monastery in Kildare—contains a list of miracles, some of which are associated with Faughart. This was mainly designed to promote the cause of Kildare for precedence in the Irish church by extolling Brigit’s virtues. Brigit could be said to have a foot in both camps, as her father was a tribal leader of the Fothairt, a Leinster tribe whose territory ranged as far north as Armagh.
The control of the primacy of Armagh by laymen was denounced in the eleventh century by St Bernard of Clairvaux in his ‘Life of St Malachy’. The tribal chiefs had usurped the temporal emoluments of the primacy and discharged by deputy the ecclesiastical functions. During his three difficult years (1132–5) as archbishop of Armagh, St Malachy saw the adoption of the Roman liturgy and he restored clerical church discipline, grown lax during the time of the lay abbots. St Bernard confirmed that four bishops, including St Malachy c. 1135, visited the village of Faughart, ‘which they say was the birthplace of Brigit the virgin’.
After Brigit’s death c. 520 in Kildare, pilgrims flocked there to honour her. To protect them from Viking raids, her remains were moved to Downpatrick c. 835, and in 1186 they were buried at Down Cathedral. In the late thirteenth century, three Irish knights en route to the Holy Land brought the skull of St Brigit to Portugal, where in 1283 it was enshrined in a local church. To distinguish themselves as they rode into battle during the Crusades, Irish knights wore St Brigit’s Crosses.
Various accounts have attested to the continued attraction of the birthplace of Brigit as a place of pilgrimage down the ages. In 1690 George Story, chaplain to William of Orange, commented on the veneration by the people of north Louth of the St Brigit’s Cross. Thomas Wright, famous English architect, visited Faughart in 1747. He described how on St Brigit’s Day the pilgrims went first to the graveyard and then to the stream, keeping vigil through the night and ending their devotions in the graveyard the following day. In the nineteenth century, the antiquarian George Petrie described the holy well at Faughart as ‘festooned with rosaries and rags of all kinds’.
Edel Bhreathnach recalls that as a child she visited the relic of St Brigit at her local parish church in Killester. In 1929, on the church’s consecration, the cardinal of Lisbon gave a small portion of the saint’s skull to Killester. It may be of interest to know that about 25 years earlier a piece of the skull brought to Portugal by the three Irish knights in 1283 was returned from Portugal to Faughart. In 1903 Sr Mary Agnes McAlister of the Mercy Convent, Dundalk, herself a native of Faughart, placed the relic in the new and imposing Romanesque-style parish church at Kilcurry, where it remains to this day, just a few kilometres south of St Brigit’s shrine.
Following the outpouring of religious fervour after the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932, the parish priest of Faughart, Fr McKee, convened a meeting of the parishioners with a view to carrying out improvements at the shrine. Some months after the completion of the renovations, His Eminence Cardinal MacRory, archbishop of Armagh and primate of All-Ireland, received the papal rescript with the Holy Father’s sanction of St Brigit’s shrine from Cardinal Lauri, the papal legate to the Eucharistic Congress.
In July 1934, for the first time in history, a national pilgrimage took place to Faughart, the birthplace of Brigit. A spell of wonderful weather prevailed in Ireland during that summer. An estimated 15,000 pilgrims from all over Ireland gathered for the occasion The two-mile-long procession took more than an hour to wind its way from St Brigit’s Church, Kilcurry, to the shrine. Behind the pilgrims was a long line of politicians led by Eamon de Valera, president of the Executive Council.
On 24 March the following year Owen Quinn, a member of the St Brigit’s shrine committee, wrote to President de Valera to thank him for coming to Faughart the previous July and to extend an invitation to return in the current year. Mr Quinn went on to explain that every evening, after their day’s work, the committee had given freely of their time and labour to work on the shrine. He went on to ask the president whether he would consider introducing a Bill in the Dáil to make the first day of February a national holiday in honour of St Brigit on the same lines as St Patrick’s Day. On 2 April the president’s office replied that the proposal wasn’t ‘practicable’.
It was to take more than 90 years before the politicians caught up with the spirit of Faughart. A new annual public holiday—the first named after a woman—was announced in 2023 to mark St Brigit’s Day. The public holiday is the first Monday in February and is in recognition of the efforts of the public and Ireland’s front-line workers during the Covid-19 pandemic and in memory of all those people who died at that time.
Reverence for Brigit remains very strong in the place of her birth. The church on Faughart Hill is dedicated to Brigit, and the nearby holy well is still ‘festooned with rosaries and rags of all kinds’. To the west of the hill is the shrine with a grotto dedicated to St Brigit. The stations of the cross along the banks of St Brigit’s Stream still attract a continuous flow of pilgrims seeking a quiet corner ‘far from the madding crowd’.—Yours etc.,
DON JOHNSTON
Ballymascanlon, Dundalk
The earliest sources, the genealogies and seventh-century Lives of Brigit, do not specify an exact birthplace. If reliable, her familial associations point in the direction of somewhere in the vicinity of Croghan Hill, Co. Offaly, on her father’s side and around Ardbraccan, Co. Meath, on her mother’s side. The reference to Faughart first appears in later lives. The Irish version of the place-name Faughart, which is Fochairt, indicates that it is not derived from Fothairt, which is the name of a specific people settled mainly in Leinster, with one branch settled near Armagh. Fochairt appears in the Life of Monenna of Killevy, which relates how Órbile, an alternative name for Monenna herself, gouged her eye out there so that she would not be attractive to suitors and young men. The likelihood is that Faughart was originally dedicated to Monenna. The complex history and archaeology of Faughart are explored by Gill Boazman in her article ‘The material culture of self-promotion: the Conaille Muirthemne kings and the ecclesiastical site of Faughart, Co. Louth’ in the Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society 28 (2015), 327–50. The extent of Brigit’s cult is discussed by Thomas Charles-Edwards in his article ‘Early Irish saints’ cults and their constituencies’ in Ériu 54 (2004), 79–102.—Edel Bhreathnach